As the title states I am looking for some advice on which micro would work better for reading the serial data produced by an 18 bit ADC. I've never worked with the launchpad series from TI but would be happy to learn and have a little bit of experience with the arduino. I plan on prototyping on one of these boards and then making my own board, think "Arduino on a breadboard", with out all the additional headers and such. Will there be any advantage to using the 16 bit operation of the MSP over the 8 bit operation of the ATMEGA? From what I understand the fact there are 18 bits shouldn't really matter for either since it will just get cut up into multiple n-bit sections. Besides reading the data, I will be doing a few calculations, storing data, reading to an LCD, and running off of batteries if that helps to peg down any advice.